Kirundi

When did Kirundi become official

The 1962 Constitution of the Kingdom of Burundi recognised Kirundi as official. Government orders, above all those printed in the Bulletin Officiel du Burundi in 1962 and 1963, came out in French and Kirundi together. When the constitution was suspended in 1966, Kirundi stayed official in practice, although it appeared less in government documents. Primary schools adopted it as their language of instruction in 1972, and the Rundi Academy was set up in 2020 to standardise it.

Who speaks Rundi natively

The Hutu, including the Bakiga, the Tutsi, the Twa and the Hima all speak it as a mother tongue. Its neighbouring dialects are mutually intelligible with Ha, spoken in western Tanzania, and the wider continuum reaches into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Kenya.

How tone works in Kirundi

Kirundi has a high tone and a low tone. Vowel length is distinctive, so a long vowel that climbs from low to high counts as a rising tone and one that falls counts as falling. Linguists cite Kirundi to illustrate Meeussen's rule, a pattern of tone change in Bantu languages. Syllables are consonant plus vowel, with no clusters and no final consonants.